Medical robotic systems such as teleoperative systems used in performing minimally invasive surgical procedures offer many benefits over traditional open surgery techniques, including less pain, shorter hospital stays, quicker return to normal activities, minimal scarring, reduced recovery time, and less injury to tissue. Consequently, demand for such medical robotic systems is strong and growing.
One example of such a medical robotic system is the da Vinci® Surgical System from Intuitive Surgical, Inc., of Sunnyvale, Calif., which is a minimally invasive robotic surgical system. The da Vinci® Surgical System has a number of robotic arms that move attached medical devices, such as an image capturing device and Intuitive Surgical's proprietary EndoWrist® articulating surgical instruments, in response to movement of input devices by a surgeon viewing images captured by the image capturing device of a surgical site. Each of the medical devices is inserted through its own minimally invasive incision into the patient and positioned to perform a medical procedure at the surgical site. The incisions are placed about the patient's body so that the surgical instruments may be used to cooperatively perform the medical procedure and the image capturing device may view it without their robotic arms colliding during the procedure.
To perform certain medical procedures, it may be advantageous to use a single entry aperture, such as a minimally invasive incision or a natural body orifice, to enter a patient to perform a medical procedure. For example, an entry guide may first be inserted, positioned, and held in place in the entry aperture. Articulated instruments such as an articulated camera and a plurality of articulated surgical tools, which are used to perform the medical procedure, may then be inserted into a proximal end of the entry guide so as to extend out of its distal end. Thus, the entry guide accommodates a single entry aperture for multiple instruments while keeping the instruments bundled together as it guides them toward the work site.
A number of challenges arise in medical robotic systems using such a bundled unit, however, because of the close proximity of the articulated camera and tool instruments. For example, because the camera instrument has proximal articulations (e.g., joints) that are not visible from the distal tip camera view, the surgeon can lose track of the current state of such articulations when moving the camera and consequently, their available range of motion. Also, when the articulations of the camera and tool instruments are out of view of the camera and therefore, not visible to the surgeon through its captured images, the surgeon may inadvertently drive links of the tools and/or camera instruments to crash into one another while telerobotically moving the articulated instruments to perform a medical procedure. In either case, the safety of the patient may be jeopardized and the successful and/or timely completion of the medical procedure may be adversely impacted.